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Printer update

I’ve been busy blowing glass the past week or so, so haven’t spent much time with the 3d printers. I did print 8 more weight collars for the weight bench, installing 4 of them last week. They work really well and are easy to print. Printing 4 at a time is easy and takes about 2 hours. What is even nicer is the new brand of filament is not jamming at all feeding the original cartesian printer, so I don’t have to monitor the print all the time.

The delta almost printed a nice cube. Only the base was off, and on reflection I think it’s because the setting for ‘probe offset’ is too large. The probe offset is basically the distance between the extruder tip touching the printer base and moving enough (into the base) to trigger the probe microswitch. There were two values in the Marlin firmware – 0.2 and 0.7. I’m using 0.7 right now and I think it’s too much, so when you calibrate the printer the final distances are out by a small amount. Not much, but just enough that the extruder is farther away from the bed on layer one than necessary for a proper first layer.

I need to spend some time with raw gcode to find the actual probe distance for my printer and then use that to recalibrate. Perhaps later this week or sometime next week.